March 14

Have you noticed that some days are just a lot busier than others are? The 14th is one such day. For instance, on the 14th in 1489, Catherine Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, woke up one morning and sadly discovered that she had run just a bit short of ready cash. To remedy this singularly unpleasant turn of events, she sold her kingdom to Venice. The reaction of her subjects has been lost to time. Also on the 14th, in 1757, on-board the HMS Monarch, Admiral John Byng put in front of a firing squad and executed for wanton neglect of his duties as an admiral in his majesty’s navy. Who would have imagined that the British were such sticklers for details of that sort? The 14th in 1883 saw the death of Karl Marx. Contrary to popular belief, he was not the fifth Marx Brother, but a hirsute social theorist whose work has been largely misunderstood by university undergraduates and tenured professors everywhere. This date in 1984 was not a particularly good one for Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein. He was the target of, and seriously wounded in, a rather amateurish assassination attempt in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Overall, the 14th is more or less a wasteland brightened only in the latter part of the twentieth century by the birth of Marieke Elizabeth Perchik (pictured at right with her sister Katherine) in 1990.